Your Body Already Knows
Fundamentals of Health Optimization
I was twenty-four and certain I could outwork anything.
When I started with triathlon training, I went all out. By ‘all out’ I mean playing pickup basketball for a couple of hours after each training session. Zone 2? I didn’t need conversational pacing. Aerobic pacing was for people who didn’t have my engine or ego. 🫠
And then I couldn’t get off the couch.
Months of overtraining catching up all at once (aka cumulative fatigue), the kind of rest your body forces when you’ve ignored every signal. I didn’t have a label for what happened. I just knew something was broken.
Starting over slowly was humbling.
What I found on the other side of that breakdown was simple. Almost embarrassingly easy.
Zone-based training. The principles of periodization. Letting the easy days be EASY. Trusting that the adaptation happens in the rest, not just the hard work.
Within a few months, I was healthier, more consistent, and performing better than I ever had while grinding through everything. The feedback was immediate and undeniable.
And here’s the best part that stayed with me:
After a couple of years of training with a heart rate monitor to measure (and control) effort, I didn’t need it anymore. I could feel my aerobic threshold. I could feel the shift into the burn (anaerobic). The data had taught me something tangible that I could sense. The instrument became internal.
I still have that ability today. Decades later. It’s nuanced but accessible. I can even spot-check myself with a slow number count to see what I get up to before grasping for the next breath. IFYKYK 😉
I think about that hard-won internal compass every time a new ‘optimization’ trend hits my feed. Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery, recently pulled the curtain back on the $8 trillion longevity industry in The Atlantic. His argument is a cold splash of water: most of what’s being sold in the expensive supplements and the unproven hacks lacks any meaningful human trials.
Reading his critique, I realized the industry isn’t just selling health; it’s selling the right to be an uncompensated test subject. We aren’t just consumers anymore; we’re paying for the privilege of being the experiment.
I find it curious. We are sitting somewhere between genuine opportunity and elaborate marketing.
I’ve tried plenty of it. I’ve done supplement stacks. I use a red light panel. I dialed in intermittent fasting. I still have my blue light blockers.
And most notably, I wore a Whoop for a while. It was a useful mirror at first. But eventually, I hit the wall Metzl warns about: the point where the data stops being a teacher and starts being a master.
I found myself in a loop of ‘biometric obsession,’ checking a screen to see if I was recovered instead of just standing up and feeling my legs. There’s a quiet anxiety that takes root when you outsource your self-knowledge to an algorithm. You start to wonder: If the device doesn’t say I’m rested, am I allowed to feel good? This is the ‘longevity scam’ at its most personal level: the trade-off of our biological intuition for a subscription fee.
That line between a tool that teaches you and a tool that replaces your own knowing is worth paying close attention to.
One of the things that’s worked best for me isn’t new. It’s a sauna.
Ancient technology. No app. No algorithm. Just heat, time, and the particular clarity that comes after. The research on saunas is legitimately strong. The cardiovascular benefits, recovery, and longevity markers. But I didn’t start using it because of the research. I started because of how it made me feel.
That’s typically how the real things show up and stick.
The morning sunlight. A brisk walk. A tall glass of water first thing in your body. Some stillness before the noise of the day. These aren’t hacks. They’re not optimizations. They’re just conditions under which a human being tends to feel like themselves.
The Blue Zones research, Dan Buettner’s deep dive into the world’s longest-lived communities, corroborates exactly what Metzl is pointing out. The people living to 100 aren’t using red-light masks or $200-a-month longevity stacks. They are moving because their lives require it, eating with people they love, and waking up with a reason to be there.
It’s the $0 protocol hiding in plain sight. As Metzl notes, the industry can’t bottle the fundamentals, so they try to sell us a more complicated version of them. But the truth is unglamorous: sleep, sunlight, and sweat don’t need a venture-backed marketing campaign to work.
None of it can be bottled.
I’m not against advancing healthy technology. I love trying it out, in fact.
What I’m against is the anxiety that comes from outsourcing your self-knowledge to a device, a trend, or an industry that profits from you feeling like you’re always one purchase away from optimal.
Twenty-four-year-old me thought I could power through everything. I couldn’t. What I needed (what actually worked) was learning to listen. Slowly. Consistently. Over years.
That’s still the work.
Not adding more. Not optimizing harder. Just building the sensitivity to know what my body is asking for…and having the discipline to give it that, even when it’s unglamorous.
The fundamentals don’t get old because they were never a trend.
